Those About to Die Review: Peacock’s Dull, Cruel Gladiator Drama Offers Empty Spectacle and Not Much Else

The runaway success of HBO’s Game of Thrones inspired a flood of big-budget epics from History’s Vikings to Amazon’s Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power , but few of those shows have been able to match its combination of awe-inspiring action and Shakespearean drama. The latest to try is the Roman gladiator drama Those About to Die , premiering this Thursday on Peacock, which is clearly going for an ancient Rome-meets-Westeros vibe. (I’ve seen the first three episodes.) It seems to have learned all the wrong lessons from Thrones , though, leaning heavily on violence and nudity and delivering empty spectacle in the place of real human emotion. It’s a dispiritingly cynical piece of work: somehow both overstuffed and underbaked, simultaneously schlocky and dull.

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Those About to Die takes us back to a Rome that is in steep decline, plagued by injustice and corruption. Oscar winner Anthony Hopkins plays the ailing emperor Vespasian, who has two sons waiting to take his crown: the battle-tested Titus (Tom Hughes) and the scheming Domitian (Jojo Macari). Iwan Rheon — himself known to Game of Thrones fans as the villainous Ramsay Bolton — here plays Tenax, who runs a lucrative gaming operation at the chariot races, where the Roman peasants gather to cheer on their favorite riders. Along the way, we meet gladiators, nobles and slaves as they all fight to hold onto a sliver of a crumbling empire. (No one seems very happy to be alive during this time, and we’re not very happy watching them.)

Those About to Die has a harsh and pessimistic tone throughout, wallowing in the casual cruelty of the era without offering much hope. ( Falling Skies veteran Robert Rodat created the series, with blockbuster film director Roland Emmerich behind the camera.) A fight scene ends with graphically hacked-off limbs, and a lady asks a slave girl if she’s “intact”… and then manually verifies. We meet a lot of people — there are more than a dozen regular cast members — but precious few of them register, since they’re all given paper-thin characterization. The slaves are all purehearted and noble, without any complexity. The women are all either wives, witches or whores — the latter of which conveniently opens the door for early-HBO levels of rampant nudity.

You’d think that the Roman setting would offer plenty of chances for classically trained actors to flex their muscles, but the lifeless scripts don’t give them much to work with. Characters launch into long monologues about the state of Rome… and we lose interest midway through. Hopkins’ presence does lend the series a sheen of prestige, but he only shows up for a scant scene or two in each episode to grumble out a few lines and then disappears again, so don’t tune in expecting to see his next great performance. That leaves us with an ensemble of blandly interchangeable actors getting wrapped up in mysteries and conspiracies that we don’t care much about in between fights and races.

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The action scenes, I will concede, are genuinely engaging, with pulse-pounding chariot races and gladiator battles. (The CGI lions aren’t exactly convincing, though.) But when the action dies down, we’re left with bits and pieces borrowed from other, better TV shows and movies. The story of Vespasian choosing between his sons has been done to death, from King Lear to Succession . His son Domitian is a faint copy of Gladiator’ s Commodus, and the manipulative Antonia (Gabriella Pession) is a Cersei Lannister clone. (Even the opening credits are a direct lift from House of the Dragon .) It’s all just so generic, and depressingly so. Capturing the magic that made Game of Thrones a mega-hit is no easy task, but Those About to Die needs to do a lot more to entertain the masses.

THE TVLINE BOTTOM LINE: Peacock’s Roman epic Those About to Die is an overstuffed, underbaked slog that slumps when the action ends.

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